


A Soul Malleable

by ifonlynotnever



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Multiple, Alternate Universe - Original, F/F, F/M, Genderswap, M/M, Parallel Universes, Reincarnation/Resurrection, Souls, Temporary Character Death, Violence, Weird/Strange/Bizarre, kink meme fill
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-04-16
Updated: 2012-04-30
Packaged: 2017-11-03 18:55:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/384728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ifonlynotnever/pseuds/ifonlynotnever
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time it happens, he is young, and an actor, and his name is Richard Brook.</p><p>And then he dies.</p><p>And he wakes up.</p><p>(For a kinkmeme prompt: "Every time Moriarty dies, he finds himself in a parallel universe.")</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. London: Richard Brook, Actor

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, lots of notes to get started.
> 
> Um, so. This. Will probably be a little confusing. It involves parallel and alternate universes, magic, sci-fi, wings, pirates, souls... Some characters may _look_ original, but they're not. They may be gender-swapped or personality-tweaked, but every single character in here has basis in the canon. (And if it gets too confusing, just tell me, because I have a chart.)
> 
>  **TRIGGERS/WARNINGS:** Dub-con/non-con/rape, het, slash (of both kinds), genderswap, gender issues (sexism, misogyny), murder, violence, (temporary) character death. These are the blanket warnings. If any others come up, I'll be sure to make a note of it.
> 
>  **Pairings:** Moriarty/Sherlock, Moran/Moriarty, Sherlock/John, Moriarty/Molly, Moriarty/Sarah, John/Sarah. (In various capacities, gender combinations, and states of consent.)
> 
> (Written for the kinkmeme prompt [here](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/17487.html?thread=113210447#t113210447).)

The first time it happens, he is young.

He is young and handsome and dying slowly—so slowly that the rage bubbles up inside his chest because _he is young_ , damn it, and he wants to live and act and be the star he's dreamed of becoming ever since he was a child.

His name is Richard Brook, then, and just before the cancer takes him, fighting for every single breath, he swears that he will come back. Some how, some w—

  


—

  


He dies.

  


—

  


He wakes up.


	2. Lindem: Jeymes Morath, King

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He wakes up, and he is a king on a throne of cold steel._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Temporary) character death, genderbending, implied non-con/dub-con, gender issues (sexism, misogyny), murder, violence.

He wakes up, and he is a king on a throne of cold steel.

And he knows, deep in his bones, that this is not heaven, and the woman who bends over him is not an angel, no matter how gold her hair is or how flawless her skin.

He knows because her smile is like the jagged edge of a saw.

  


—

  


Her name is Serrah ("Sarah," he says at first, but she glares at him and repeats, _"Serrah,"_ in a hiss, and he remembers after that.) and she is the royal magician, though the servants whisper that she's also the royal whore.

She is the reason why he is not dead.

"I brought you here from another world," she tells him, sprawled indolently in his lap, her nails raking through his hair. He wants to flinch away from her, but the last few days have taught him that to do so would not be a wise decision. "I searched far and wide for you, for a soul like yours, and when I found you, I dragged you through the veils between the universes."

"A soul like mine?" he asks, allowing his voice to quaver gently.

"Mm," Serrah hums. "A soul compatible with this body, malleable enough for me to shape in the fire of your rage, but hard enough to pierce the iron veils."

And he doesn't understand, really, what that means, but he nods anyway and very visibly tries not to jerk back when she laughs.

  


—

  


He learns about this world in bits and pieces, starting with the man Serrah wants him to become.

A king. King Jeymes of the High House of Morath, seventh king of Lindem.

("James?" he asks Serrah, but she gives him a sharp look and makes him repeat after her until she loses patience with the clumsiness of his tongue. He still can't hear the difference between the pronunciations.)

(And Lindem, on the map in the War Room, looks suspiciously like England, but Richard—Jeymes—doesn't mention it.)

He's not the real Jeymes, of course, though he finds that they are almost identical in appearance. The real Jeymes had his soul ripped out of his body while he was alive, not on the point of death, as Richard was, and Serrah assures him that he screamed his throat bloody when she did it. She tells him that the real Jeymes was graceless and foolhardy and temperamental, which Richard takes to mean as _Jeymes was straightforward and brave and he didn't let Serrah control him like a puppet._

Richard-Jeymes is not straightforward or brave. He knows this. In his other life, he hid behind masks so thick that they became second nature. So thick they must have obscured his soul.

Because beneath the clumsiness and the fear, there is a nearly reptilian calculation, a cold-blooded cunning that makes him as far from Serrah's ideal puppet as it is possible to be. And he knows that if Serrah had seen that, she would never have pulled him through the veils between the universes.

  


—

  


He plays along for a year, just long enough to get his footing and learn about this new land and life. To pick up some of Serrah's magic.

Then he kills her.

He rips out her heart, then he rips out her soul, then he hangs her body from the highest tower of his castle as an example to those who think that the man he played for a year is the man he is in reality.

  


—

  


(With her last breath, Serrah curses him to wander from life to life, death to death, world to world. There will be no rest for his soul.

He laughs in her face.)

  


—

  


The second time it happens, he is fifty-three, and he has ruled over Lindem for thirty-one years.

He is a tyrant and a despot and the people love and hate him in equal measures because as bad as he is, the monarchs on the continent are worse.

He has two sons, two daughters, and three wives. It is the third wife, Silah, who kills him.

Ironically, it is Silah whom he loves the most, even if she does share her bed with an uncouth low-born with straw hair and calloused hands. He excuses her indiscretions because she is young and intelligent and a fighter, and he gets his own back when she is in his bed.

Silah is the only one of his wives who came to him unwillingly. Her brother, the clan-king in the north, sold his seer of a sister to Jeymes for reinforcements against the invaders from across the sea. And while Jeymes had been planning on rejecting the offer, on the grounds that he'd had no need for another seer, he'd liked the look of her enough to take her, instead, as a wife.

(Sometimes, Jeymes suspects this was the clan-king's intention all along.)

But Silah—she _is_ beautiful. Her skin is pale, her lips are perfectly-shaped, her eyes are small and odd but expressive. She is tall and willowy, with sharp bones and an even sharper tongue. And her hair... Oh, Jeymes loves to sink his fingers into the inky waves, loves to pull at it, loves to hear her gasp of pain when he tugs just a bit too sharply.

Oh, he loves her.

It doesn't surprise him that she is the one to kill him.

  


—

  


She does it in the night. She feeds him sweet cakes soaked in a sleeping draught, and wine spiced with a paralytic. He eats and drinks it all, even though the set of her mouth tells him what she's planned.

When he wakes up, she is standing over him, fully dressed, a dagger in her pale hand. The moonlight slants perfectly over her features.

"I hate you. I would kill you over and over if I could," she says, her voice cold as she slits his throat. The low-born she consorts with waits for her by the door, cloaked in shadows and foolishness, but Jeymes doesn't look at him. No, he looks at his third wife, his young, beautiful beloved.

He smiles, opens his mouth to tell her he loves h—

  


—

  


He dies.

  


—

  


He wakes up.


	3. The Quadrisphere Cities: RT-523, Covert Agent of the House

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He wakes up in a white room._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Temporary) character death, murder, violence, sci-fi overtones.

He wakes up in a white room, and he thinks he's in heaven and almost laughs at the ridiculousness of it (because if anything, he deserves hell) up until the minute a man looks down at him and says, "All right there, Arty?"

"I'm Jeymes," he tries to reply in his haughtiest voice, but it comes out a slur of consonants and vowels that do not make words.

"Yeah, that'll be the drugs," the man says. "Best I could do under the circumstances. You just sleep for now."

So he does.

  


—

  


The man's name is G, and he is Jeymes' field partner. He is taller than Jeymes, but older, with hair just turning grey and skin tough as leather and laugh lines deepening around his eyes. Despite his age, he seems quick and strong, though not particularly clever. Perhaps this is why he is convinced that Jeymes' apparent memory loss is the result of emotional trauma and a two-minute stretch where his heart stopped beating.

Jeymes knows better. He knows that the man who once inhabited this body is dead and gone, having most likely departed when he flatlined. He knows because he remembers Serrah's blessing-as-a-curse, the one in which he is guaranteed to live forever as he walks from body to body.

  


—

  


The world he's in now is a far cry from both Jeymes' Lindem and Richard's Britain. From what he can gather from G ("What do you mean, is it short for something? It's just G. The letter. G-1243. Christ, those bastards did a number on your head, didn't they?"), the vast majority of the world is desert, with bright, gleaming oasis cities nestled in the dunes.

Right now, they are trapped in an abandoned hospital in City 103-02, waiting for reinforcements and a med-evac. Outside, beyond their shelter, the barbarians and their sandwyrm pets wait, thirsty for blood and flesh.

(G shows him their location on a gritty, coffee-stained map of the North-Western Quadrisphere. It has been thirty-one years since Richard Brook last looked at a map of his own world, and his mind is blurry with drugs, but he has the vague notion that they're in the vicinity of Berlin. Maybe Paris. The never-ending deserts make it hard to tell.)

G tells him many things as they wait, probably attempting to revive memories that will never return.

His name, for example, is not Arty, as he'd initially thought, but RT-523. According to G, he'd gained the extra letter as a commendation from their superiors after he'd saved a mission from certain ruin in City 207-09. They hadn't worked together for that mission, but G tells him he'd heard about it; everyone in the House had heard about it.

It is at this point that something clicks in RT-who-was-Jeymes-who-was-Richard's mind.

 _Ah,_ he thinks smugly, just before he passes out again. _I'm a spy._

  


—

  


He's been in this body for a day and a half before the reinforcements and the med-evac arrive. He doesn't catch so much as a glimpse of the former, but the latter is too large and too loud to miss. Something like a lightweight cross between an aeroplane and a helicopter touches down just outside the hospital doors and waits as G helps him stumble out. They're barely inside before it takes off again and he is surrounded by medical personnel.

  


—

  


It's only when all of G's drugs wear off that Richard-RT can feel how close to death he is. He is bruised and battered and broken. They cut things off and sew him up and replace pieces, but at the end of a long day, all he feels is pain and exhaustion and the resignation of organs that are slowly shutting down.

He would be bitter, maybe, to have died and come back only for this, for three days of agony, but that is not his way. There's another life waiting for him after this.

G sits with him for hours, wallowing in guilt and grief beneath his pathetic attempt at a mask of strength.

  


—

  


On the fourth day—the day he decides to die—he gets another visitor.

This visitor is tall and wide and dressed in an impeccable suit, and he seems vaguely familiar, like someone RT knew when he was Jeymes. The man barely spares G a glance before he dismisses him, and it's only too obvious from the way G melts away, his eyes averted and his demeanour respectful, that this man is their superior. _The_ superior, even.

And, apparently, he has no use whatsoever for pleasantries.

"I have been informed that you currently suffer from acute amnesia," the man begins abruptly, staring down at him. RT suspects he's supposed to feel awed or small or honoured that this man would deem to come to his deathbed.

He doesn't.

"Yes," he wheezes back. The man's face twists in disgust, then quickly smooths back out.

"I see. In that case, I presume it would be meaningless to thank you for your contributions to this city and her people when you don't remember what they are. Still, formalities must be observed. In honour of your bravery and sacrifice, His Lordship, the Governor of City 053-28, has granted you a third letter. In his absence, I hereby rename you RTY-523. Your income will be adjusted accordingly."

 _Income_. He's dying, and they give him a raise?

It's enough to make him laugh, gasping and sputtering beneath the oxygen mask as the man turns on his heel and leaves.

  


—

  


The third time it happens, he's only been in this body for four days, and they have all been miserable.

"You look a right mess," G says when he returns, the tone of his voice hatefully soft and gentle. "What'd he say? MIKROF, I mean."

"Gave me... another letter," he replies in a ragged whisper. It's all that's left. "Is that... his name? MIK...ROF?"

(And the languor, the exhaustion in his bones reminds him of a deathbed thirty-one years past. He hated it then and he hates it now, but the reasons for the hate are different. This time he just wants to die. To move on.)

"Yeah. Six letters by forty, can you imagine? They say he's gunning for a seventh. Look at you, though. Three letters. Which was it?"

"Y."

"Oh, that's a good one. RTY." G clears his throat and looks away, through the open doorway. The re-christened RTY follows his gaze, his hazy eyes sweeping over doctors and nurses and patients and visitors. His breaths get shallower and shallower and he knows this is it.

He is about to close his eyes when he catches a glimpse of a calloused hand carding through hair that tumbles free in waves and curls, black as pitch against porcelain skin and razor-sharp cheekbones, and his eyes go wide and his organs fail and his heart stops and the last thing that comes out of his mouth is a choked off scream of, "Si—!"

  


—

  


He dies.

  


—

  


He wakes up.


	4. The Eyrie-on-High: Mad Mara Angelica, Political Prisoner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He wakes up ... and there is a man beside him, one graceful tawny wing draped over them both._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: (Temporary) character death, genderbending, implied dub-con (mentally compromised participant?), gender issues (sexism, misogyny), murder, violence, torture, wings.

He wakes up, and for a moment he wants to rage against the world because he knows exactly what he saw just before he died, and it was _Silah_.

But the rage lasts only a moment. A moment, and then everything changes.

Because he is in a bed, and there is a man beside him, one graceful tawny wing draped over them both, and RTY-who-was-Jeymes-who-was-Richard is now a woman.

  


—

  


He'd always known women were weak, even the ones as strong as Silah, but he'd never known exactly how weak they were until he became one.

Until he— _she_ woke a man with her screaming, and tried to push him out of her bed, and he subdued her with nothing but his hand around her wrists and his leg across her knees and a dizzying slap across her face.

  


—

  


This is not heaven. If anything, despite the presence of beings who might tentatively be called angels, this is a kind of hell.

Her name—the name of the body she's in—is Mara Angelica, which is horrifyingly ironic considering that she is apparently the only woman in the city without wings. Once upon a time, she was the Priest-King's favourite acolyte, destined to inherit his position.

Now, she is a traitor and a blasphemer. She ran for years, flying from continent to continent on wings of flawless ivory, until at last the Priest-King's men caught her and brought her home and cut off her wings before a crowd of millions.

And when that was over, they threw her in the highest tower to die.

But she didn't. Oh, she went mad, yes, but she didn't die. Not until an entire year later, when her spirit left her body in the middle of the night and gave the empty shell to a man whose soul breached the veil between the worlds.

  


—

  


The man who holds her down and slaps her is named Sevasti Moor, and he is the one who tells her the story in a manner weary and rehearsed, as though he's done it more than once.

When Richard-Mara remarks on it, still spitting and trying to wrench her hands free, Sevasti only laughs bitterly, his grip tightening.

"That's because I have," he growls. "I told it to you yesterday and the day before and the day before that, and I will tell it to you again tomorrow if I must, until you stop forgetting your life. Until this Mad Mara leaves and brings back my Mara Angelica."

  


—

  


Sevasti Moor is six-foot-four and wiry and blonde and he treats Mad Mara like glass, sharp and breakable. He is taciturn when she needs information, and talkative when she needs silence, and his entire existence is a tremendous irritant.

He is the only human contact she is allowed, and that is because he is just as much a prisoner in this tower as she.

  


—

  


"What did you do to get yourself trapped up here?" she asks on the twelfth day. Not because she cares, no. She's just bored. So mind-numbingly bored.

Sevasti shrugs. "I protested your imprisonment."

"How?"

The corner of his mouth curls. It looks cruel, Mara thinks, and she likes him a bit better for it.

"I shot an arrow through a man's eye. Barbed. They tried to pull it out and took part of his brain with it."

"Which man?" she demands. She will not know him, of course, but it seems like a good question to ask.

"The Priest-King's brother. You spat on him just before they cut off your wings."

Yes. In this moment, she likes Sevasti very much indeed.

  


—

  


It takes forty-seven days before she begins to feel her sanity splinter. Forty-seven days of nothing. Of no one but Sevasti and his endless repetition of her life story.

(And it is useless to attempt to convince him that she remembers; the few times she tries, he begins to test her, shooting off questions that she doesn't know the answers to. She quickly abandons the effort.)

So perhaps it is not entirely surprising when she takes Sevasti to her bed for the first time since the _other_ Mara died, and allows him to have her.

  


—

  


She does not grow to love him; if she grows to love anything, it is the exploration of this new form, and the sex that enables it.

Sometimes, when Sevasti is cruel and cold and taciturn, when he tells her the tales of his murderous pursuits in her name, when his lip curls and he curses the Priest-King's name—those times, she can almost like him.

But she does not love him.

  


—

  


And then her monthly bloods stop and her belly begins to swell.

Sevasti, when he figures it out, is ecstatic, enthralled; Mara, on the other hand, would kill the bastard inside with her own hands, if she could. She is tired of this not-life in a tower, and a child is the last thing she needs.

(She knows, somehow, that she would not die in childbirth; this body, this wretched vessel, is unexpectedly resilient.)

So it comes as a relief when the Priest-King's guards unlock the door and storm into the room and rip her from Sevasti's smothering embrace. They say nothing to her, make no explanation or excuse as they drag her out of the room and down the thousand spiralling steps of the tower.

  


—

  


(In some vague way, it pleases Mara to realise just how clumsy her guards are as they escort her down the steps; the staircase is too narrow to accommodate their ungainly wings, and they are too used to flying to navigate gracefully on foot. She thinks of London pigeons for the first time in ages, and laughs aloud. The men seem unnerved by the sound, so she does it again, and again, and again.)

  


—

  


The room they bring her to is cavernous and empty save for two elaborate wooden thrones on a dais against the far wall. It does not take much effort to realise that this is the Throne Room.

It takes even less effort to realise that the man sitting in the larger throne is the Priest-King. The man who ordered her wings sliced from her back and left a mass of angry, aching scar tissue against her scapulae.

Even taking into account Sevasti's tendency to exaggerate, and his vitriolic bias, the Priest-King looks nothing like what she expects. He is a smallish man, middle-aged and hardy, with arching wings of pure white. His eyes are keen and blue, intense as he watches the guards force her to her knees before the dais.

His hair is the colour of faded straw.

The low-born.

The man who stole Silah away two lives ago.

The rage rises, the thudding beat of it in her ears, drowning out the words, hateful and false, that spew from his mouth.

"—raise this child in safety and solitude," he says, spreading his hands out in a kind of supplication. "I'm not unmerciful, Mara. I will let you leave. Just... say you won't do anything foolish again."

His eyes are kind and genuine, sad and regretful, but emotions are easy to falsify. Richard-in-Mara knows this; it was his livelihood, once.

"If you let me go," she hisses, "I will raise this child to hate and defy you and those who follow you. I will raise it to become your assassin."

(She is proud of her diction; it sounds almost like Serrah.)

And there: the Priest-King's eyes flare dangerously, hardening as she watches. He motions to the guards flanking her, who jerk her to her feet and drag her away once more.

  


—

  


The fourth time it happens, it is in a public square, five days after the interview with the Priest-King.

The square is in the centre of the city, surrounded on all sides by marble towers and wooden store fronts. The streets—and the skies—leading to it are flooded with people falling over one another for a good last look at wingless Mad Mara. Downy feathers drift through the air, loosened by rough jostling or carried on the wind from on high.

The Priest-King is present, of course. Mara doesn't so much as glance in his direction.

No. From the moment they haul her up to the chopping block, Mara's eyes are trained on her executioner.

 _Silah._ Of course.

If there is a god, then He (She? It?) is good. Very good. There is no hand Richard-Jeymes-RTY-Mara would rather die by than Silah's.

Silah looks much the same as she has always looked, though her glorious hair has been shorn short, in ringlets close to her scalp, and her nose looks as though it's been broken more than once. And then there are her wings: huge, but gracefully so, fitting of the frame they are attached to. Dark. Not black, not like her hair, but rather a deep charcoal that gradually lightens into dove grey at the tips.

In one hand is a sword, curved wickedly and gleaming bright and silver. Jeymes had a sword like that; it ought to be too heavy for a woman to handle, but Silah carries it lightly, easily.

How things have changed.

  


—

  


They do not execute her right away. There is a speech and an official sentencing, and at one point, Sevasti, whom they have brought to witness the spectacle, pleads for mercy on her behalf.

They cut out his tongue instead.

Mara watches. She feels nothing, except for when the Priest-King flinches away from Sevasti's agonised screams. Then she feels a vicious joy.

Until, finally, it is her turn.

"Have you any last words, Mara Angelica?" the Priest-King asks, his sombre voice filling the square.

Mara thinks for a moment, then nods at her executioner.

"What is your name?"

The square fills with a great rustling wave of sound. _Feathers ruffling and resettling,_ she thinks distantly. The spectators are shocked. She doesn't care.

The woman—not-Silah—cocks her head to the side.

"You really have gone mad," she says flatly. She pauses. "Does it really matter? You're to die in a moment. By my hand."

Richard-Mara shrugs as best she can with her hands tied behind her back. "It matters."

The executioner barks out a laugh.

"Sentiment, I suppose. How tedious." She raises her sword. "Verna Angelica. I am the Priest-King's Justice. Once, we were sisters."

 _Once?_ Richard almost asks, but it's too late, and the blade is swinging d—

  


—

  


He dies.

  


—

  


He wakes up.


End file.
